There has been a lot of interest and I have gotten great feedback on the post about the book I’m writing with Grant about legislative data. […] Among the questions on data standards that have sparked interest is the question of how to assign unique identifiers to legal text. These are needed for many reasons, in a variety of contexts. The most straightforward is to be able to hyperlink to a specific subsection of a bill or law.

Some options for creating the unique identifier include:

A unique randomish code (e.g. based on the current datetime)

A hash of the text of the section

A URN or URL identifier based on a standard, human-readable path to the section (e.g. us/uscode/title26/section100)

Some combination of the above

[…]

Rather than get ahead of myself and draft out the entire chapter on unique identifiers, I’ll stop here and invite your comments.

What is important to preserve in a unique identifier for legal texts?

What id schemes have proven successful in other document-based structures?

What would Google (or Linus Torvalds) do?

If you have Insights or connections to People With Insights– please comment here or let me or Grant know.